Good and evil, an absolute conception: Twin Peaks ontology

In Twin Peaks, even leaves rustling in the wind evoke fear. I'm sure you remember the scene in which Laura Palmer's funeral has gathered the town folk. The scene starts, I think, with the rustling leaves. We see it for a good while, and there is the sound, too. Silence. The feeling I get is that something really bad is happening here. It's not clear what this fear is about, or whether it's about anything at all. It is not necessarily the fear of something "behind" the trees that disconcerts me. I am not necessarily anticipating some terrifying beings hiding in the woods. The deserted traffic lights have the same effect on me. Unsettling, but not in the sense that I could pin down any element in the image that has this specific frightening effect on me. Nature, and human artefacts as well (the rubbled train wagon), are emedded within a feeling of being surrounded by something evil, a feeling of being seen. The elusive owl that is BOB. Watching Twin Peaks for the first time, I remember that it was this indeterminacy that intrigued me about the world of Twin Peaks. Evil takes on many shapes and forms and the relation between these different images is never settled.

BOB is the incarnation of evil in Twin Peaks. One of the first things we see of him in the series is his sudden entrance in Sarah's vision. Our fear meshes with that of Sarah. I'm not sure if I know what BOB is. BOB's face is always contorted, as in a state of gruesome ecstacy. Grinning, screaming, gripping on to something. M suggested that his face expresses some crazy form of joy. That is interesting. Does the demeanour of BOB convey lust? What would it mean to say that it does? I'm not sure what kind of concept 'lust' is, what form of attitude we take to something when we perceive something as 'lust'. BOB is the lust for destruction, the lust for nothing in particular, the lust of consumption (in the sense of people consuming each other like food). BOB consumes his host body and his victim. BOB embodies a certain image of male sexuality as a blind, unstoppable, destructive force of nature that possesses a man in the form of an evil spirit and transforms him into unrecognizability. BOB is nourished by killing, BOB feeds on the familiar body and does with it what he wants. His single drive is to induce suffering and pain. My associations drift towards Freud's concept of 'thanatos'.

The evil as a mystic force is perhaps the most common picture in films depicting the staggering, entranced psycho killer roaming the streets for prey - the prey is usually a girl, usually with some specific characteristics fetischized by the killer (H suggested something to the effect of evil being a form of fetishism, I am ready to agree with that to some extent). Twin Peaks explores this theme, too. Even though BOB has much in common with the other-worldliness of the killer in mainstream horror movies, Twin Peaks develops this theme and in this I find something interesting.

BOB is a reality of its own. Twin peaks does not really make clear its nature. The residue of The Black lodge comes across like a form of perpetual restlessness; the non-space in which every room resembles each other. BOB is glimpses of fear breaking into the common world of goodness and relations. In the last episode of season one, when the murder is resolved and Leland has committed suicide, Coop, Albert and Sheriff Truman engages in a discussion about BOB. BOB is, they seem to agree, "the evil that men do".

BOB is a manifestation of the thought that evil is, in some sense, not a part of ourselves, but that it preys on us, eats our soul, possesses us. For that reason, I was always a bit perplexed by the attempt to explain Leland's transformation by his encounter with the "real" Bob. The ontology of Twin Peaks displays some manichean tendencies: the good and the bad are two separable entities, two modes of reality, existing, as it were, on a par as two forces. What is so scary about BOB is that he is not motivated by anything. He is, in a way, "abstract". He is simply driven. BOB's consummation of his victims could be said to be a very straightforward picture of the theory of lack as developed in psychoanalytic theory: a form of eternal incompleteness that has to take possession of something; both an object and, if you will, a host body (I would say that the movement goes like this, others might disagree). BOB's strange ecstacy/trance is captured in his dance. A most striking scene is the one in which Leland/BOB dances alone, holding the picture of Laura in his hand. His face expresses grief and some sort of crazed movement at the same time. In this scene, BOB's desire is expressed in Leland's empty arms. It is unclear at what BOB's desire is directed at, his persona signals a mere "dance of destruction".


Twin Peaks is, from beginning to end, a story about sexual violence. In Twin Peaks, violence moves on different levels and is manifested in different forms. Violence takes place within the setting of cherry pies, black coffee and delicious donuts, but also in sleazy bars and in the dark woods, not to talk about the within the walls of the "happy home". Violence crops up everywhere and it is always sudden and gruesome.

The BOB character is a force that corrupts its victim, who is possessed with something that has nothing to do with himself. But what is creepy about Twin Peaks and its "ontological constallation" is that it is the victims perpetrated and molested by BOB that are somehow blamed from attracting the sexual energies of BOB. Laura, it somehow seems, victimizes herself by leading a "voluptious" or "lustful" life. Most men seem to respond to her in much the same manner as BOB: Leo, the Renault brothers, Mr. Horne. Every male (even Coop, it sometimes seems) desires her and that desire comes out as obsessive, dark and violent. Laura worked at One Eyed Jack's. She "attracts men" and enjoyed various intoxicating substances. One Eyed Jack's is a place where men fulfill their sexual fantasies and let loose their sexual drive. From this point of view, the sexual violence of BOB is not essentially different from that of other men. Everyone, in various degrees, in Twin Peaks, is possessed by some strange force. Some internet writers have interpreted BOB as the state of original sin. That makes sense as a reading of the series in some ways, some of which I have talked about here (the predicament of the world is its inherent evil, from which final redemption is impossible - another version of The Black Lodge).

The "good girl" always seems on the verge of being transformed into "a bad girl". I am not sure whether Twin Peaks repeats the patriarchal, grotesque naturalization of sexual violence - existing in men as a potentiality (the most extreme form of which is being possessed by BOB) and existing in women as a longing for victimization. Audrey, for example, is clearly fascinated by the murder in other ways than grieving a friend. Her desire to gain entrance to One Eyed Jack's is very ambivalent. One dimension of it is her challenge of her father's authority, but it is not the only one. ("The world of men" is not only the world of Mr Horne and his colleagues - a world in which women have gained entrance partly as sexual figures - but also the world of the Bookhouse boys, an image of "safe&sound masculinity" - or not.) But despite this, I would hesitate to say that the women in Twin Peaks are mere objects. They are subjects fighting in a world where they are turned into objects and in which violence is a ubiquitous threat.

The transformation Leland/BOB is one strand of season 1, but there are other transformations too that are marked by "movement of desire": Donna-the-good-student/Donna coming out as a "foxy lady", Nadine-the-failed-hausfrau/Nadine-the-reborn-teenager and, of course, Madeleine/Laura. If you look into in what precise way women are sexualized in Twin Peaks, I'm sure you will notice some interesting patterns.


The (perhaps only) man falling outside the scheme of "potential rapist", Big Ed, is presented as being controlled by his crazy wife Nadine. "Those drapes, Ed!" Ed is solid and good, there is no hint of violence (in the sexual sense) in him. Ed might be the only person who is not possessed by some dark desire. Everything he does seems direct, honest and open.

I definitively find sexual violence being depicted ambiguously in Twin Peaks. There is a clear sense in which the world of Twin Peaks (in just the same way as the world of Blue Velvet) is awaiting disruption. This is not saying that Twin Peaks is also about friendship and goodness. But the ambiguity is there. As it turns out, even Cooper, a gentlemanly, generally chaste character, is, by means of his desire for Annie, a proper object for BOB, who possesses him in the last episode. Is the logic of Twin Peaks that men's desire for women turn them into monsters? That could be interpreted as both a disturbing enchantment with regard to heterosexist ideology and the unravelling of a dimension of that same ideology.